It was big news when James Gunn was fired from the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 after tweets the filmmaker had posted a decade previously resurfaced and went viral, with fans and the stars of the franchise blasting Disney’s decision to forcibly remove him from the director’s chair.
None of us are the same people we were ten years ago, and a lot of folks believed that the Mouse House pulled the trigger far too quickly. The Guardians ensemble posted an open letter supporting Gunn, while Dave Bautista went one step further and said he was done with the MCU if there was a change of director.
While Gunn was eventually reinstated and the whole thing has long since been brushed under the carpet, in the interim he jumped straight into the DCEU. The Suicide Squad seems like the perfect fit for his style and sensibilities, but in a new interview, the 54 year-old admitted that Warner Bros. swooped straight in to offer him any project he wanted, just a couple of days after he was given his marching orders by Disney.
“Warner came a-calling pretty immediately upon the news. I think everything kind of went down with Disney on like a Friday, and I think by Monday, Warners were trying to get a hold of me to talk to me about Superman and a bunch of other stuff. But it took me a little while to decide what I was going to do. I really just needed to take care of myself from an emotional and spiritual place.
“Before agreeing to anything, I took the three ideas that excited me the most. Two were actually DC projects, and then the other one was an original idea. For about a month, every other day I worked on one of those projects, trying to see where the ideas would go. The Suicide Squad really did seem the thing that excited me the most. That’s when I went and told DC, because they’d offered me basically anything I wanted to make, that the one I wanted to do was The Suicide Squad.”
The Suicide Squad appears to have been the right choice based on everything we’ve seen and heard so far, and it’s admittedly difficult to envision James Gunn tackling something like Superman, when he’s always leaned more into the irreverent and unexpected throughout his career. It’s worked out pretty well for all parties in the long run, too, with the soft reboot of David Ayer’s lukewarm blockbuster also leading to John Cena’s HBO Max series Peacemaker, while Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 will be in front of cameras before the end of the year.
